Senate fails Newtown, Conn., common sense

Four months after the massacre of 20 first-grade students and six educators in Newtown, Conn., the Senate responded Wednesday by rejecting every reasonable effort to make these and other shootings less likely.

Expanded background checks? A ban on assault weapons? Limits on high-capacity magazines? No, no and no.

Where does that leave the nation? Exactly where it has been - a place where criminals and crazy people too can easily get their hands on firearms capable of inflicting mass killings. A place where movie theaters and elementary schools become scenes of unimaginable tragedy. A place where 86 people per day are killed by guns.

It's hard to exaggerate what a shameful display the Senate votes were, or what a distortion of democracy. Moments before her assault weapons ban was voted down, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., made an emotional appeal to her colleagues to "show some guts."

If only.

Instead, too many showed their fealty to, or fear of retribution from, the National Rifle Association and other gun groups.

The cravenness of the votes was most apparent on the compromise proposal - sponsored by Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Pat Toomey, R-Pa. - to expand background checks. Their amendment was an attempt to shut a huge loophole that routinely allows people who never should be able to buy guns legally to get them, with no questions asked, at gun shows or via the Internet.

Of all the proposals the Senate took up Wednesday, this likely would have been the most effective. It was gun-safety groups' top priority. Opinion polls showed it had the backing of as much as 90 percent of Americans, including 74 percent of NRA members. Yet after an avalanche of misinformation by opponents, it fell six votes short of the 60 votes needed for passage under the Senate's procedural rules.

Pundits immediately cast the vote as a huge defeat for President Barack Obama, and that it was. It also was a defeat for the Newtown families who came to Washington, D.C., to lobby, only to be callously dismissed as "props" by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky. Most important, it was a defeat for common sense and public safety.

Joined by the families at the White House after the vote, Obama vowed to fight on, and he has history on his side. This is a long game. President Ronald Reagan and his press secretary, Jim Brady, were shot by a madman in 1981. It wasn't until 1993 that Congress finally passed the Brady law to require background checks on gun sales.

In the wake of Newtown, several states have moved to adopt tougher gun laws. Those restrictions should provide useful data on what works. But federal legislation is the most important, and if advocates of better gun laws want to win in Washington, they'll have to take a lesson from their opponents.

The gun lobby succeeds because it has more members, more money and more intensity. If gun-safety advocates want to win, they'll have to get better organized. They'll have to be savvier about the nation's urban-rural cultural divide in regard to guns. And they'll have to convince wavering lawmakers there's a political price to be paid for opposing sensible gun restrictions such as the ones defeated Wednesday.

- USA Today

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Senate fails Newtown, Conn., common sense

Four months after the massacre of 20 first-grade students and six educators in Newtown, Conn., the Senate responded Wednesday by rejecting every reasonable effort to make these and other shootings